Garland, John

(Johannes de Garlandia)

(ca. 1180–ca. 1252)

   John Garland was a Latin poet and grammarian who was born in England and taught at the University of Toulouse as well as the University of Paris. He was the author of five major works in Latin verse, as well as several pedagogical texts, including a Parisiana poetria discussing the various styles of versification.

   In his own verses, Garland informs us that he was born in England and studied at Oxford before moving on to the University of Paris in about 1202, where he mentions that one of his instructors was ALANUS DE INSULIS. He also declares that, having spent most of his life in France, he prized that country over the land of his birth. In 1229, after teaching for some time at Paris, Garland was chosen as one of the instructors to be sent to the newly founded university in Toulouse in the Languedoc region in the south of France, where he was made master of grammar. Thus Garland was thrust into hostile territory during the Albigensian Crusade.While in Toulouse, he began his epic poem De triumphis Ecclesiae (The triumph of the church), a poem celebrating the victories of the church in the Crusades and its triumphs over heresy, including three chapters on the Albigensian Crusade itself. By 1232 or 1233, however, the orthodox professors at the university were becoming increasingly unpopular in that region, and Garland fled to Paris, where he spent the remainder of his life.

   Back at the University of Paris in 1234, Garland wrote a poem in 1,426 hexameter (six-syllable) lines on the Latin laws of accent called, appropriately, Accentuarium. He wrote an Epithalamium beatae Mariae Virginis (Wedding song for the blessed Virgin Mary) and Carmen de Ecclesia—a poem on the liturgy that he dedicated to Fulk, the bishop of London. He also composed the Integumenta Ovidii, a mythographic commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A number of his verses were written as teaching texts or to help his pupils: He wrote a Compendium totius grammatices (Compendium of grammar) in verse, as well as a verse treatise entitled Equivoca, which is basically a list of homonyms. His Dictionarius cum commento (Dictionary with commentary) is a glossary for use by his students, and he wrote, in addition, a rhetorical tract called Exempla honestae vitae (Moral examples)—assuming, in the classical sense of Cicero, that the rhetorician was a good man expressing the truth.His Parisiana poetria (ca. 1233), was probably intended as a textbook for his students at Paris. As mentioned above, it was a kind of poetic handbook containing illustrations of the various styles of Latin versification, to which is added an interesting section of the “vices” of poetry, such as digression, obscurity, and faulty diction. Garland relies on Horace and on GEOFFREY OF VINSAUF.

   Other works have been attributed to John Garland, many erroneously. He has often been confused with another John Garland who wrote two important musical treatises in the later 13th century. He also was the purported author of an alchemical study actually composed by the 14th-century author Martin Lortholain.His grammatical works were popular in England in the later Middle Ages, but his pedantic and uninspired verse did not find an audience in the Renaissance.

   Bibliography

   ■ Garland, John.Morale Scolarium. Edited, with an introduction, by Louis John Paetow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927.

   ■ Johannes de Garlandia. Compendium grammaticae. Edited by Thomas Haye. Cologne (Köln): Böhlau, 1995.

   ■ ———. De triumphis ecclesiæ libri octo. Edited by Thomas Wright. London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1856.